IOT Growth to Continue in 2017 - Report

The Internet of things (IOT) will continue to bring changes to business models and create new innovations in services across industries. This is according to a report from global market research firm, TrendForce.

TrendForce released its IT Industry Forecast for 2017, which shows rapid expansion of IOT applications and strong demand for innovative technologies.

Using big data solutions, businesses can discover new insights and deal with operational blind spots that were previously undetected, according to TrendForce.

Jimmy Liu, TrendForce IOT analyst, says: "The traditional IT structure of an enterprise does not have the capacity to deal with the explosive growth of data coming from the market.

"Hence, more companies will be focusing on revamping their IT structures. At the same time, the field of artificial intelligence (AI) is again attracting significant public attention due to advances in deep learning algorithms. In the near future, AI systems using sophisticated algorithms not only will be able to help humans make complex decisions, but also achieve intelligent automation of tasks."

The TrendForce report also highlights how telecoms and networking equipment industries are focusing on development of 5G networks, and are in the process of testing their technologies on mobile endpoint devices.

Owing to the maturation of big data and cloud computing technologies, smartphones will be upgraded with new features for various applications, such as virtual reality. Functions of endpoint devices will be redefined in 2017, says TrendForce.

"The development of mobile application services will revolve around mobile health, mobile payment and mobile life services," says Kelly Hsieh, TrendForce senior research manager.

"In the mobile health market, health and fitness apps will be the mainstream products. As for mobile payment, the rapid rise of this market has led to booming demand for biometric technologies, with fingerprint recognition as the most popular payment authentication procedure," Hsieh adds.